This blog will follow my trials and tribulations playing live mid stakes Texas Hold'Em throughout California.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Investing Update

For anyone interested, here is my original post regarding getting started in the stock market, in which I espoused a basic strategy of owning as few ETF's as possible and keeping costs low.

For the first, I don't even know, very long time that I was a professional poker player, my net worth remained pathetically stagnant. I started in August 2008, and for the first 10 months or so just won and won and won and won, but during that time basically lost my ass in the stock market. Then from June 2009 until late 2010 I pretty much didn't win any money whatsoever (in retrospect it's SHOCKING that I'm still at this), but my investments did quite well. So on the whole for the first I suppose 2.5 years of my poker career I really didn't get anywhere. I exacerbated the problem by not studying enough and continuing to not play 40 due to very short term bad results (even though I was rolled for the game) and a general fear of going quote unquote "broke", which to me just meant losing more than some arbitrary amount that I set for myself to lose. There were lots of other reasons I didn't succeed that I've chronicled at length here, but that's not the point. The point is that over the last 16 months I've actually managed to win at poker AND have the bottom not fall out of the stock market, and therefore for the first time since my days at Oracle I've actually been accumulating money. This is all kind of pathetic if I think about it too long, but for now I'm just enjoying it and looking at those first 2.5 years as a learning experience. Anyway, here is an update on the holdings of my portfolio, updated a few days ago when I purchased some more of the international funds

Domestic Equities

IVV - 27%
VO - 17%
VB - 15%

International Equities

VEU - 15%
VWO - 16%

Bonds

BND - 10%

Obviously this thing is very equities heavy and specifically very focused on the United States. I'm planning to move away from that over the next year or so, adding to the international and bond pools more so than the domestic equities. And the money is split pretty haphazardly over two accounts, a tax advantaged IRA and a standard brokerage account, which isn't great. But the point is that I've kept up with it and kept it simple enough that at no point have I thrown up my hands and gotten frustrated, which to me is just a big honking win. I've also done the beginning research into buying a rental property, which to be honest is just a daunting and terrifying endeavor that I'm not really sure I can pull off. However, that is how you see normal people end up with comfortable income streams in their 40s and 50s, so I should probably give it another long hard look while money is almost free and prices are bouncing around what hopefully should be the bottom. But realistically I needed to get that done before the summer started to happen since everybody I know is getting married and I'm going to have no time whatsoever. So for now I'm going to keep my head down and try to keep up my winning ways.